What if industrial waste water could become fuel? With affordable, long-lasting catalysts, water could be split to produce hydrogen that could be used to power fuel cells or combustion engines. By conducting complex simulations, ...

The history of Greenland's snowfall is chronicled in an unlikely place: the remains of aquatic plants that died long ago, collecting at the bottom of lakes in horizontal layers that document the passing years.

A team led by the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory used neutron analysis to better understand a protein implicated in the replication of HIV, the retrovirus that causes AIDS. The enzyme, known as HIV-1 ...

A new, high-pressure technique may allow the production of huge sheets of thin-film silicon semiconductors at low temperatures in simple reactors at a fraction of the size and cost of current technology. A paper describing ...

Using ultrashort laser pulses an international team at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics has managed to manipulate the positions of atoms in hydrocarbon molecules ...

(Phys.org)—While peering into the nearby Triangulum Galaxy known as M33, astronomers have detected what appears to be a giant cloud of hydrogen around it. According to research published online on May 5 on the arXiv pre-print ...

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with members from institutions in Spain, France and Egypt has demonstrated that hydrogen atoms on graphene yield a magnetic moment and furthermore, that such moments can order ferromagnetically ...

The hydrogens—hydrogen and its isotopes—are the simplest and most abundant of the elements in the universe. Conceptually hydrogen, with a single proton and electron is the simplest atomic system in the periodic table ...

Small particles emitted into air during the burning of hydrocarbon fuels damage the human respiratory system and enhance the greenhouse effect. In their agglomerated form, these particles form soot that consists predominantly ...

Hydrogen atom

A hydrogen atom is an atom of the chemical element hydrogen. The electrically neutral atom contains a single positively-charged proton and a single negatively-charged electron bound to the nucleus by the Coulomb force. The most abundant isotope, hydrogen-1, protium, or light hydrogen, contains no neutrons; other isotopes contain one or more neutrons. This article primarily concerns hydrogen-1.

The hydrogen atom has special significance in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory as a simple two-body problem physical system which has yielded many simple analytical solutions in closed-form.

In 1914, Niels Bohr obtained the spectral frequencies of the hydrogen atom after making a number of simplifying assumptions. These assumptions, the cornerstones of the Bohr model, were not fully correct but did yield the correct energy answers. Bohr's results for the frequencies and underlying energy values were confirmed by the full quantum-mechanical analysis which uses the Schrödinger equation, as was shown in 1925/26. The solution to the Schrödinger equation for hydrogen is analytical. From this, the hydrogen energy levels and thus the frequencies of the hydrogen spectral lines can be calculated. The solution of the Schrödinger equation goes much further than the Bohr model however, because it also yields the shape of the electron's wave function ("orbital") for the various possible quantum-mechanical states, thus explaining the anisotropic character of atomic bonds.

The Schrödinger equation also applies to more complicated atoms and molecules. However, in most such cases the solution is not analytical and either computer calculations are necessary or simplifying assumptions must be made.